Amazon Web Services

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, is demanding documents from the free speech social network Parler related to its financing after last month’s deadly attack on the Capitol.

Amazon’s incoming CEO, Andy Jassy, says he’s committed to Amazon’s video game development efforts, in response to a damning report from Bloomberg last week about the problems facing the team. “Some businesses take off in the first year, and others take many years,” Jassy wrote in a staff email seen by Bloomberg, “Though we haven’t consistently succeeded yet in AGS [Amazon Game Studios], I believe we will if we hang in there.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Tuesday he would stand aside later this year as chief executive of the company he built from a startup into one of the world’s most valuable firms.

Amid rising political tensions in the United States, Telegram founder Pavel Durov says his chat service has taken down hundreds of public calls for violence, in accordance with the platform’s terms of service.

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

Social media platform Parler, which has gone dark after being cut off by prominent service providers that accused the app of failing to police violent content, may never get back online, said its CEO John Matze.

The creators of social network Parler have sued Amazon for ending a web hosting agreement after last week’s riot at the US Capitol. Parler claims Amazon Web Services severed ties to stop Parler from competing with the larger social platform Twitter, and it’s asking a court to stop Amazon from shutting down its account — arguing that an extended shutdown would be like “pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support.”

Over the past several months, Parler has become one of the fastest-growing apps in the United States. Millions of President Trump’s supporters have flocked to it as Facebook and Twitter increasingly cracked down on posts that spread misinformation and incited violence, including muzzling Mr. Trump by removing his accounts this past week. By Saturday morning, Apple listed Parler as the No. 1 free app for its iPhones.

World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a year-long global campaign against tobacco consumption, targeting 100 million people across 22 countries of the world including Nigeria.

“We want to switch from gut-driven decisions to data-driven decisions,” said Kai Demtroder, vice president of data transformation at BMW. “We have a few hundred data scientists at BMW, but the aim is to make the data accessible to everyone.”

Amazon Web Services recently had to defend against a DDoS attack with a peak traffic volume of 2.3 Tbps, the largest ever recorded, ZDNet reports. Detailing the attack in its Q1 2020 threat report, Amazon said that the attack occurred back in February, and was mitigated by AWS Shield, a service designed to protect customers of Amazon’s on-demand cloud computing platform from DDoS attacks, as well as from bad bots and application vulnerabilities.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing platform of Amazon.com Inc, said on Wednesday it has launched its data centre operations at three locations in Cape Town, South Africa, setting up its first “AWS Africa region”.

Amazon.com on Tuesday said it was extending its cloud to 5G networks in partnership with Verizon Communications, so developers can run latency-sensitive programs on mobile and connected devices.

If Amazon.com decides to fight the Pentagon’s decision to award a highly contested $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft, it could act as early as next week.

Microsoft has won the sought-after JEDI cloud computing contract with the Pentagon valued at as much as $10 billion (€9 billion) over a decade, dealing a blow to the market leader, Amazon, which had been the front-runner.

Wunderlist founder Christian Reber has offered to buy back the popular task management app from Microsoft to avoid it being shut down.

India’s Reliance Industries on Monday announced a partnership with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, in a move that deepens the offerings of its Jio telecoms unit while posing a direct challenge to rival cloud services providers such as Amazon.com and Alphabet’s Google.

The head of Amazon.com Inc’s cloud computing division on Monday said the company would work with any government agency that followed the law, in contrast with rival Microsoft Corp, which has touted its rejection of controversial sales.

Microsoft Corp. says it is set to spend $100 million to open its first development centres in Africa to work with local partners and governments, with initial sites in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya.

China’s Huawei will build two data Centres in South Africa from March,it said, as part of plans to expand cloud services across Africa.

Amazon.com Inc on Thursday reported a profit near $2 billion, the largest in its history, as the online retailer drew millions of new customers to its Prime fast-shipping club for the holiday season and as changes to U.S. tax law added to its bottom line.

Amazon.com is selling off the hardware from its public cloud business in China, amid tightening regulation over online data that is creating a hurdle for technology firms operating in the world’s second-largest economy.